Posted
by
msmash
on Monday December 04, 2017 @11:40AM
from the another-fad dept.

Launched a few days ago, CryptoKitties is essentially like an digital version of Pokemon cards but based on the Ethereum blockchain. And like most viral sensations that catch on in the tech world, it's blowing up fast. From a report, shared by an anonymous reader: Built by Vancouver and San Francisco-based design studio AxiomZen, the game is the latest fad in the world of cryptocurrency and probably soon tech in general. People are spending a crazy amount of real money on the game. So far about $1.3M has been transacted, with multiple kittens selling for ~50 ETH (around $23,000) and the "genesis" kitten being sold for a record ~246 ETH (around $113,000). This third party site tracks the largest purchases made to date on the game. And like any good viral sensation prices are rising and fluctuating fast. Right now it will cost you about .03 ETH, or $12 to buy the least expensive kitten in the game. So now we have people using Ether, an asset with arguably little tangible utility -- to purchase an asset with unarguably zero tangible utility. Welcome to the internet in 2017.

In Europe, formal futures markets appeared in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Among the most notable centered on the tulip market, at the height of Tulipmania. At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsworker. Enjoy your tulips tÃte de merde!

1% of the 1% got their money from working hard (paraphrasing 'everyone else paying them'). Many of the 1%ers got their money from relatives. I didn't say all but a lot of them inherit wealth. You don't have to look around much today for examples.

Please. Cats can be perfectly affectionate (and dogs can be unaffectionate). Cats commonly bond with their owners. If you want to talk about integral part of the family, you should see my cats interact with my kids (age 4 and 7).

Yes, there are some crazy cat people (the term crazy-cat-lady exists for a reason), but I think crazy dog people are a lot more common. For every 1 crazy cat lady, there's 10 people who can't go to the store without taking there dog in the car every time (including morons who let th

Reports from the people that look after them when I'm away tell me that my cats get stressed when I'm not around.

They come to me for company when I'm at home - whether they're hungry or not.They do demand attention, but they also show affection. Little nibbles, one likes cleaning my hair for me. It's not unusual for me to wake up trapped in bed by three cats surrounding (or on) me.

What makes them differ from dogs is that they know how to take themselves outside to shit, they bring me gifts and if I do leave

Because there wasn't a way to control supply. A normal rare digital Pokemon, would be a just a data base entry, with its rarity, only managed to the price they would want someone to pay for such a card. Now for actually rare printed cards, you have real scarcity so there may be a card that someone would say No to having to sell, at any cost. Just because it is more powerful, or has some emotional attachment too. A digial Pokemon can be purchased at a price, to a point where it may be a common card, for

If people are hoarding ether-cats or whatever these things are, how does that make the world worse? (Well, it does because blockchains require electricity, but I mean in comparison to other things they might hoard.) It's not as if hoarding these ether-cats deprives anyone else of anything. It's more like hoarding original art-work when good quality copies are already in circulation...but it's not even as damaging as that.

And in fact hoarding tangible goods like oil is actually a *good* thing for the market in many cases.Let's say the 1yr futures contract for oil is $100/barrel and today's price is $50.So, you use your currently available capital and buy a ton of oil to store in your tanks that you (own/just bought) and sell that oil on the futures market for $100.

In a year the price is $125/barrel, but you're selling at $100 (because you have to honor the contracts you sold) and thus you now reap a 100% gain on your initial

If you sell something you bought, or try to sell it, I don't think the term is "hoarding" but rather "storing". Hoarders collect things they have no intention of selling. It has all the costs of consuming and none of the benefits (well, except that you don't gain weight).

Plausible, but many people think themselves rich off BitCoins, and plan to keep holding them indefinitely as the value keeps increasing. And they think themselves rich *now*. One could say that they got rich off hoarding without doing much violence to the terms.

I think most hoarders, if challenged, would claim that they intend to use the stuff they are hording "someday". This is unlike the multiple cans of beans that I store, with the plan where I actively use first the ones with the oldest "sell by" dat

The context seems to be trying to use "utility" in the economic sense but that concept is entirely intangible by definition. As in, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much utility did you get from eating a candy bar vs eating an apple. It was a fad measurement in economics for a while but is largely relegated to the curiosity bin since for all practical purposes its impossible to properly quantify.

Nobody in their right mind spends $23,000 on a picture of a cat. The average joe who sells cat jpegs might get the price up to $20 if they're really lucky. The sellers and developers are being paid for something else.

Right now it will cost you about.03 ETH, or $12 to buy the least expensive kitten in the game

Whenever you read a story about cryptocurrency, no matter how timely, know that the prices you read are always going to be out of date by the time you read. The cheapest cats right now are going for 0.06-0.07 ETH.

My son and I watched this last night and it was possible to get cats for 0.03 and below, but they were snatched up immediately. Now you don't even see them for that price.

Wealthy people are buying digital blockchain cat pictures. A sitting US senator, Chuck Grassley (R-Bumfuck, Iowa) said this yesterday on television:

"“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing — as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies,”

Get that? He thinks people who aren't millionaires just spend all their money on booze or women or movies.

I'm pretty sure we have ample evidence to start setting up the guillotines. We don't have to kill all the rich people and the government officials who service them, I'm thinking the rest might get the message.

I think you did pretty good in letting us know how worthless your opinion is. I do find it ironic that you make the point he is an elitist while calling the place of the people he is looking down his nose at "Bumfuck".

Another tolerant liberal on parade. I bet you don't even realize you are actually WORSE than the senator you quote.

I think the Senator's point was that - those who would normally be hit with an estate tax (those in the top 10%) tend to actually invest their funds. Most of these silly purchases you see are typically by those without the means to really afford such spending, long-term. How many multi-millionaires that actually earned their money by typically building small businesses or investing in tangible assets (real estate) will, as they are contemplating the passing of their assets to their heirs, go "ooh, shiny E

Yep. I know the quote. And I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool partisan liberal, and understand he wasn't saying you're either an investor or a gambler. But that, typically, those who blow all their money are not affected by the estate tax - and those that tend to invest (how many multi-millionaires do you know that don't have investments and 401Ks?) are overwhelmingly affected by the estate tax. But hey - partisanship! Hurray!

I think the Senator's point was that - those who would normally be hit with an estate tax (those in the top 10%) tend to actually invest their funds.

I think he's making it up as he goes along.

How many multi-millionaires that actually earned their money by typically building small businesses or investing in tangible assets (real estate) will, as they are contemplating the passing of their assets to their heirs, go "ooh, shiny Ethereum kittehs!"?

Nope. I got it right [taxpolicycenter.org]. The top 10% pay 90% of the Estate taxes (meaning some below that level are also paying). It's not impossible to amass an estate of more than $5 million. Say your family bought a few homes, 40 years ago, in East Santa Monica. Now that is worth $3MM right there. Add in a couple of good 401Ks and you have a net worth beyond $5.5MM. And now you get to pay taxes on that.

Tax cuts in general work for stimulating the economy at times when taxes have been high enough to choke off economic activity. In such an environment cutting tax stimulates the economy and produces more revenue at the lower rate than the original higher tax did.

But the Laffer curve is a curve, not a magic incantation. If tax rates are already low, another cut will stimulate a lot less than at high tax rates, and the deficit just increases.

Our problem now is a continuing lack of high-quality jobs due to our not following up in promising areas of technology. Prosperity based on ad revenue mined from social media networks is not a basis for lasting economic strength.

Look at California high speed rail as an example of long-term infrastructure, mired in endless legal squabbles initiated by vacuum-headed NIMBYites. In China, if they want the next bullet train to go through here, it just gets done.

Our problem now is a continuing lack of high-quality jobs due to our not following up in promising areas of technology. Prosperity based on ad revenue mined from social media networks is not a basis for lasting economic strength.

He thinks people who aren't millionaires just spend all their money on booze or women or movies.

He's just exploiting a winning political issue. Estate/inheritance taxes are deeply unpopular, and even though only "the rich" pay them, they are actually even more unpopular with low income people. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that 40% of Americans believe that they will someday be in the top 1%.

The top 80% can afford to save something for retirement - it's just a question of priorities, and some do indeed spend it on immediate gratification instead of saving. The top 50% or so can afford to save enough that they'll have the option of not drawing it down during retirement, and leaving something to their grandkids - again a question of priorities of burning it all, or passing some on.

Right now $500k is a bare minimum to supplement social security (as normally invested, that's maybe $20k/year), and

Why is "your kids will never have to work another day in their lives after you die" a good cut off point? The fairest system would be a 100% estate tax on everybody. Then everybody actually goes out and earns their money, and everybody gets taxed much less on what they actually earn. (Unfortunately people would find ways around the estate tax with large gifts in their old age.)

If I earn and I don't spend what I earn, why don't I have the right to give to my kids? Also, how the heck is $600k (maybe $24k in a trust fund) "your kids will never have to work another day in their lives after you die"?

It might be interesting as a social phenomena, but it isn't much different than getting all excited about dropping a bunch of in-game currency on a set of ebony armor in Skyrim. Weren't people selling their shorts on the housing market right before the bubble? Speculation built on speculation...

Clearly crypto coins, and now crypto cats are the wave of the future and will displace real money/cats in the future. Animal control is run by the government and can be used to STEAL your hard earned real cat. A crypto cat is clearly better in every way*.

I'm waiting for the crypto mice, you can feed to your crypto cats, and the crypto hay and grain you feed to you mice.And then imagine someone invents crypto snakes! Compeeting with the cars about the mice...

Frankly, I don't see the difference between buying virtual cats on the blockchain and buying money on the blockchain. Either way, you're buying a unique artifact recorded on the blockchain whose value is entirely determined by demand and the coherence and continuence of this particular blockchain.

Once you lock it to a blockchain, what's the difference between a dollar and a cat, anyway? They're both bits of crypto-secured information.

My prediction was that the Second Dotcom Bubble was fueled by phone-based apps, cheap cloud computing, the occasional successful IPO and social media hyping everything instead of CNBC. Nope, it's going to be this. I was wrong...we're going to see a lot of individual "investors" hurt by this, or at least greatly underwhelmed.

The time to get into mining or trading cryptocurrency was years ago. Now it's just a gold rush and even established exchanges are looking into offering futures. I'm a little pissed that

Yeah but when mortgages crash it has consequences, when the cryptocurrencies crash some nerds have more video cards then they really need and have a harder time gaining from ransomware. Its the tulip crash if instead of money people were offering to buy the tulip bulbs with beanie babies.

Sure, but it ought not have any more ripple effect than if they'd spent it on Battlefront II loot boxes. They basically spent the money on the bitcoins already and you can't leverage those for anything like an equity loan so the money is already gone and they're playing pretend looking at numbers on the computer. Instead of getting to unlock Darth Vader they just get nothing.

You do realize a lot of people invested real money into these schemes.

And not just their own money. Plenty of people leveraged their credit card line and are deeply in debt. It is the modern version of going to vegas, maxing out your credit cards, and placing it all on black. If it hits, you win big. If not...well, there's always bankruptcy.

Clearly these prices are seriously over-inflated, and likely caused by bots buying all of the virtual kittens as soon as they are available.
Call your Senator [slashdot.org], get them working on it before it's too late.

So, this is just like the Second Life real estate bubble? People are planning on making a fortune investing in something with a marginal cost of close to zero for an infinite number of copies? Or to people really get six figures worth of satisfaction from virtual felines?

I'm adding this to my list of happenings with society and technology that prove the unibomber was correct in his assessment of humans + technology.

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical neces